Alan Seeger Poems

Alan SeegerAlan Seeger (June 22, 1888 – July 4, 1916) was an American poet.
Born in New York, Seeger moved with his family to Staten Island
at the age of one and remained there until the age of ten.
In 1900, his family moved to Mexico for two years, which influenced the imagery of some of his poetry.
His brother Charles Seeger, a noted musicologist, was the father of the American folk singer, Pete Seeger.
Seeger entered Harvard in 1906 after attending several elite preparatory schools,
including Hackley School, where he became an editor of and contributor to the Harvard Monthly.
After graduating in 1910, he moved to Greenwich Village for two years,
where he wrote poetry and enjoyed the life of a young bohemian.
Having moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris to continue his seemingly itinerant, intellectual lifestyle,
on August 24, 1914, Seeger joined the French Foreign Legion so that he could fight
for the Allies in World War I (the United States did not enter the war until 1917).
He was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre,
famously cheering on his fellow soldiers in a successful charge
after being hit several times himself by machine gun fire.
One of his more famous poems, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, was published posthumously.
Indeed, a recurrent theme in both his poetic works and his personal writings prior to falling in battle
was his desire for his life to end gloriously at an early age.
Seeger's poetry was not published until 1917, a year after his death.
'Poems' was not a successful work, due, according to Eric Homberger, to its lofty idealism and language,
qualities out of fashion in the early decades of the twentieth century.
'Poems' was reviewed in The Egoist, where the critic commented that
"Seeger was serious about his work and spent pains over it.
The work is well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quality.
It is high-flown, heavily decorated and solemn, but its solemnity is thorough going, not a mere literary formality.
Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity;
everything about him was in keeping." The man who wrote this review of 'Poems' was T. S. Eliot,
Seeger's classmate at Harvard.